Montgomery County and state elected officials are bracing for the impact of Donald J. Trump’s upcoming presidency on the county’s federal workforce, which is largest in the state, with nearly 96,000 residents serving as federal employees, according to state data.
Trump has pledged to cut the U.S. Department of Education and “restructure” other federal agencies and programs, leaving some federal workers nervous about potential impacts on their jobs, NPR reported Wednesday. Trump also proposed moving some federal agencies, programs and as many as 100,000 jobs out of the Washington, D.C., metropolitan region during his previous term as president and in 2024 campaign videos.
“This is one of those disasters that falls far outside our budgetary scope,” County Executive Marc Elrich said during a media briefing Wednesday. “We’re going to have to take a recalibration as we see things unfold, and it’s likely to not all unfold at once.”
More than a dozen federal agencies have campuses, offices or headquarters in the county. These include the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is headquartered in Bethesda, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which are both headquartered in Silver Spring. And many county residents commute to federal government offices and agencies in the District.
Trump announced Tuesday in a post on the social media site Truth Social that he appointed Tesla CEO Elon Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to head a commission he plans to create called the Department of Government Efficiency.
In the post, Trump said the commission will “dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies.”
Trump said the organization will operate outside of the government, so it is unclear what influence it will have. Ramaswamy has called for mass layoffs of federal employees, according to NBC 4. During his presidential campaign, Ramaswamy ran on a platform of eliminating several federal agencies.
Elrich said Wednesday he anticipates that if Trump is successful in these efforts, it will result in job loss or other financial setbacks for county residents who work for the federal government.
“We struggle now just to make rental assistance available to a small number of people,” Elrich said. “I cannot imagine what it’s going to be like when you have possibly tens of thousands of people who either have to sell their homes or have to find another job and aren’t able to pay a mortgage payment.”
Elrich said it is important to remember that not just government officials and other employees could be impacted, but also “the people who clean the buildings and operate the buildings.”
“They’re all going to be casualties as well. So this is big, and it’s hard to grapple with that. We don’t know what the number is going to be. I don’t know when we’ll know what the number is going to be,” Elrich said. “We don’t know if Congress is going to go along with everything, so there are a lot of questions out there.”
Dan Reed, regional policy director for Greater Greater Washington, an organization that advocates for housing, transportation and land use policy in the Washington, D.C., region, said that marginalized communities could be disproportionately impacted by changes or cuts to federal agencies. Reed said this overlaps with the demographics of people who face greater barriers to housing and transportation.
“Part of the reason why the D.C. area has such a huge minority middle class, particularly a Black middle class, is because of the federal government,” Reed said. “The federal government hired people at times when they couldn’t get a job elsewhere. It’s why we have a large LGBTQ community [here].”
Reed said these changes could also affect workers who support the population of federal workers in the region.
“The people who drive the buses and shelve groceries and teachers and nurses — these are all people whose jobs exist in part because we have a big population that is supported by the federal government,” Reed said. “So the ripple effects will impact every single community in this region, and especially marginalized communities.”
Van Hollen addresses concerns
At a meeting with the District 18 Democratic Breakfast Club at Parkway Deli in Silver Spring on Tuesday, U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) of Kensington addressed constituent concerns about the upcoming administration, including the impact on federal agencies.
Van Hollen referenced last year’s decision to relocate the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) headquarters from the District to Prince George’s County.
“There are a lot of Republicans who want to get rid of the FBI altogether. That’s not going to happen, but we worry about shenanigans,” Van Hollen said, according to a recording of the event.
Van Hollen said he thinks it’s unlikely that the Department of Education would be dismantled, but that congressional Democrats should not be complacent in working to encourage or convince Republican colleagues to vote to keep it in place. He said it is difficult to predict what the Trump administration may do to eliminate or change federal agencies.
“I do not see this happening,” Van Hollen said. “But we’re going to have to get out there and fight really, really hard, because we don’t know what they’ll try to do.”
State, county facing funding issues
Elrich said his main concern is that the county budget is already stretched thin, and that the county may not be able to increase its spending for support services for residents in financial need or otherwise marginalized.
“It all depends on what the real hit is on our budget. How much we lose in primarily income tax revenue is potentially a big thing, so I can’t answer that,” Elrich said. “Even in our last budget, we had the luxury of being able to use some of the reserves to do some major one-time things that we needed. But we took our reserves back down … so we don’t have a lot of room to play with, and if it’s a long, ongoing problem, the county will wind up looking much different.”
Maryland Matters reported Wednesday the state government is anticipating a widening budget gap that could result in one of the worst fiscal situations in 20 years, according to analysts. This could result in the county receiving less state funding than in previous budget cycles – even without the possible impacts of funding cuts under the Trump administration.
Elrich said at a press briefing the day following Election Day that cuts to federal agencies in the county could result in a countywide tax increase, although he did not outright propose such an increase.
County Councilmember Dawn Luedtke (D-Dist. 7) criticized the idea of a tax increase as a response to Trump in a social media post.
“We will fight to protect our County from whatever comes our way,” Luedke wrote. “Increasing the cost to live here doesn’t do that.”
Elrich said during Wednesday’s press briefing that it’s difficult to know what plans to make without knowing what the Trump administration will do.
“We’ll try to help as many people as possible … but this is unprecedented. It’s not like a pandemic which goes away, and it’s not like a bad storm,” Elrich said. “I wish I could say something more comforting … but in looking at the numbers realistically, all I can say is, we’ll do everything we can. There could be limits to what we can do.”
